Summer

Meanwhile, the official suspension of the semester in the 14 CEGEPS and 11 universities still on strike imposed a lull in the struggle. In a sense, the government was locking-out student unions from campuses for the summer, in order to “ease off tensions”, as officials put it. Having no strike renewal votes to organise, most local unions stopped organising general assemblies, while those which maintained them saw numbers of student participation plummet.

Long months of constant struggle and repression also began to bear heavily. With the advent of the summer months, large portions of students turned their attention to holidays or temp work. The severe requirements of modern life, which, for many of us, means having to work during the holiday season to pay for food and housing, soon caught up. Networks of relief and mutual aid, which could perhaps have helped maintain the strike community, were for the most part nonexistent until after the strike was over.

Nevertheless, many students still considered themselves as being on strike and took part in various protests during the summer. Notably, efforts to disrupt events surrounding the Formula-1 racing event in Montreal, while spearheaded by anti-capitalist groups, became linked with the student struggle as one local student union’s assembly decided to organise protests aimed at cancelling the race altogether. With security reinforced and repression hitting hard on the weekend’s rallies, these efforts were largely unsuccessful.

As the weeks passed by, while the pots and pans protests had nearly completely faded away, rumors of elections grew.